Gerry Owens: The Remnants
Black Bag Music

Multiple facets of Gerry Owens' musical personae come into play on The Remnants. Whereas a subtle industrial tinge, for example, works its way into its instrumental material (Owens is involved in an alt-industrial project named Lluther), its strong cinematic character has roots in music the Ireland-based composer's created for films, movie trailers, and documentaries.

The Remnants arrives after an almost eight-year break Owens took following a ten-month tour with Lluther. Burned out and desperate for change, he and his wife moved in 2012 to a cottage on a mountain in Connemara in the west of Ireland. While he was initially productive, with music for a number of trailers the result, Owens composed nothing between 2014 and 2018. However, a two-month stay at the home of his father-in-law, American poet Robert Grey, revived his creative spark, the result (in its extended, fifteen-track form) a fifty-minute collection of atmospheric dark ambient whose full title is The Remnants – A Soundtrack to Second Hand Memories.

The intense, at times harrowing stories Grey shared about his family history and ancestors made Owens want to translate such material into musical form and to that end used electronics, acoustic instruments, and decrepit instruments, the latter from Grey's home, to do so. Stylistically, the result is reminiscent of the respective soundtracks Ben Frost and Mark Korven created for the cable series Dark and the film The Witch, so much so it's safe to say admirers of those productions would perhaps feel much the same about Owens' creation.

Throughout this dramatic collection, foreboding themes punctuate disturbing atmospheres, said phrases often emphatically voiced by cello (e.g., “Sterilised”), sometimes in multi-layered form, and underscored by sweeping synthetic washes. That aforementioned industrial quality emerges in the grime that encrusts certain passages and in the crackle emanating from the drones. As macabre as the material generally is, occasional moments of light do surface, a delicate piano episode in “The Bone Garden” a memorable example; that said, more representative of the overall tone is “Saving the Dead,” with its epic, doom-laden pulsations. Ambient soundscapes predominate, which makes the beat-driven “The Barn is on Fire” conspicuous for deviating from the general style.

Owens strikes a judicious balance between light and dark extremes. In lesser hands a title such as “Poor Mad Cousin George,” for instance, would have become a wild or even cacophonous exercise; Owens more alludes to madness than tries to evoke it explicitly. Any horror film producer looking for a soundtrack artist for an upcoming cable network series would thus be wise to look up Owens. No long-form visual correlate was created for The Remnants, but its sounds are already so evocative actual film content hardly seems necessary.

October 2020